Polarizing Leader Fades Into the Twilight

The Iron Lady

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady."Credit
Alex Bailey/Weinstein Company

The best thing about “The Iron Lady” may be that viewers going into the theater with strong views, pro or con, about its subject, the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, are likely to emerge in a state of greater ambivalence, even confusion. Those who know or care little about her will also be confused, but for different reasons.

Let’s stick with the first group for the moment. Nearly anyone who was alive and reading newspapers — or listening to English-language pop music — in the Western world in the 1980s probably has an opinion about Mrs. Thatcher. To the ideological right she was a hero, even more than her friend Ronald Reagan, whereas the left saw her as a monster. There may have been some mixed feelings in the middle, but she herself had little use for such wishy-washiness, reserving special scorn for the “wet” and the “wobbly” on her own side.

Nor, if the film is to be believed — and it is, in its way, a credible enough portrait — did she have much patience for the discussion or display of feelings of any kind. When a doctor asks the aging Thatcher (played with brilliant slyness and sly brilliance by Meryl Streep) how she is feeling, he is answered with an impromptu lecture on the over-emotionalism of modern culture and a stout defense of the supreme importance of thinking. Ideas are what matter, she insists, and I suspect that a great many people of various ages and political inclinations would agree.

But it does not seem that Phyllida Lloyd, who directed “The Iron Lady,” and Abi Morgan, who wrote the screenplay, are among them. Though the film pays lip service to Mrs. Thatcher’s analytic intelligence and tactical shrewdness, its focus is on the drama and pathos of her personal life. In her dotage, watched over by professionally cheery minders, she putters about in a haze of half-senile nostalgia, occasionally drawn back into the glory and pain of the past.

Between flashbacks that trace her journey from modest beginnings — the phrase “grocer’s daughter from Grantham” is attached to her like a Homeric epithet — through the leadership of the Conservative Party and beyond, Thatcher is visited by the ghost of her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent), and by her daughter, Carol (Olivia Colman). Carol’s twin brother, Mark, unseen in the film, is far away in South Africa, his distance emphasizing his mother’s loneliness and isolation. Denis’s shade is genial, mischievous company, but also a reminder of what has been lost and what might have been.

All of this is touching to witness. Stiff legged and slow moving, behind a discreetly applied ton of geriatric makeup, Ms. Streep provides, once again, a technically flawless impersonation that also seems to reveal the inner essence of a well-known person. Her portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher in power, while equally impeccable, is limited by the film’s vague and cursory treatment of her political career. “The Iron Lady” is, above all, the story of a widow and a half-abandoned mother who happened — didn’t you know? — to have been one of the most powerful and consequential women of the 20th century.

Would the life of a male politician be rendered this way? Is this an unfair question? It seems to me that Ms. Lloyd and Ms. Morgan try to have it both ways, to celebrate their heroine as a feminist pioneer while showing her to be tragically unfulfilled according to traditional standards of feminine accomplishment. On her first day as a member of Parliament, Margaret (played in those early years by Alexandra Roach, with Harry Lloyd as a smiling young Denis) pulls out of the driveway as her children chase after her car, begging her not to leave them. Later she announces her intention to seek the party leadership on the day that Carol has passed her driving test, earning a rare rebuke from her husband for putting herself first.

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As a young woman she faces down the condescension of powerful and entitled Tories with a mixture of charm and steel, communicating her acute awareness of sexism and class prejudice in a way that makes her eventual triumph inspiring. But as the film reckons the cost of this triumph to Mrs. Thatcher and her family, it suggests that the double standards she fought against still flourish. In trying to make her more human, more sympathetic, the filmmakers turn a self-made, highly original woman into something of a cliché.

They also manage to push the great passion and distinction of her life — her pursuit and exercise of power — into the background. This is not unusual in biopics, which frequently turn artists into substance abusers and sexual adventurers who just happened to cut a few records or paint a few pictures on their way to redemption. “The Iron Lady,” following this template, makes a particular hash of British history, compressing social and economic turmoil into a shorthand that resembles a chronologically scrambled British version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” (Miners’ strike/Falklands War/I can’t take it any more ... .)

In general the film is more attuned to process than to policy, which is conveyed by means of a few catch phrases and snippets of archival news footage. We learn that Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions, the I.R.A., the Argentine junta and more than a few of her allies, at times angering segments of the public to the point of insurrection while winning three consecutive elections, a modern record. The cabinet meetings and backroom dealings are quite entertaining. Richard E. Grant as Michael Heseltine and Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe stand out from the crowd of grousing toffs in chalk-striped suits, though of course not as much as Ms. Streep. But it will be hard for anyone not familiar with the story to have much sense of what is at stake.

As for “The Iron Lady” itself, beyond the challenge it poses for Ms. Streep, its own reason for being is a bit obscure. It is likely to be the definitive screen treatment of Mrs. Thatcher, at least for a while, and yet it does not really define her in any surprising or trenchant way. You are left with the impression of an old woman who can’t quite remember who she used to be and of a movie that is not so sure either.